darcshadow

If it was answered, I missed it as well. Wildgoose posted an image but the font he used was not the exact font, just a pretty close one and he didn't say what the font was. The S and O need to be rounder and the E's middle line needs to be shorter.

Import the image into your design software of choice then with the poly line/bezler tool trace the image. I'd start with one of the Ls on the side. Make one, and get it sized correctly. Then copy it and move it to the next one and adjust as necessary. Do this for one side, then copy, and mirror it and put it on the other side. Then join the top edges together and bottom edges together and you're mostly done.

Is paint fade really much of a problem with new automotive paint these days? Especially if it's only going to be on there a couple of years?

You might try installing the Windows 7 XP Mode option. http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=8002 This is different from running a program with the compatibility mode set to XP. This is basically a virtual computer running XP so hardware that does not have Win7 drivers will still work. I use this at home for an old scanner and some web cams. Works great.

That's exactly how you do it. The punch through punches exactly what you see through the lower item.

Here's my go, using Inkscape. I rotated the bottom half of the design just a little to make the gap more uniform. Then I drew a line through the middle of it. Typed the text out to the side, converted it to a path, ungrouped it, unioned it all, then copy. Then select the path through the middle, from the menu select path, patch effect editor and added Pattern Along Path. Then click the paste icon, change the pattern copies to single, and adjust the tangential offset till the text is where you want. If you select the Rosanne from the attached file and open the path effect editor it will already have the pattern along path, just create your new text and do the converstion described above then copy and paste it into the pattern along path editor. I'm not 100% sure, but I think you will then need to covert the new patern to a path before it will cut correctly. design.svg

It's lit with green LEDs from inside the base.

Here's a quick trace after playing with the image a little. I changed it to gray scale, then adjusted contrast, did some burning and dodging, adjusted contrast a little more then finally imported it to Inkscape and did a trace. DS2.svg

Your best bet to start it to edit the original image. Make it black and white, or at the very least gray scale then adjust contrast and brightness to get closer to what you want the final to look like then try the auto trace. To join two objects there are several ways of doing that. If you want to go the node edit route you need select two nodes of one object and do a delete segment between two non end points. Do that again for the second object, then join the newly created end points of the two objects. It's much easier to see what you are doing if you work in outline mode for this type of editing. There are youtube vids and tones of toutorials out there to help you along.

There is also a button that will add nodes. If you select two nodes and hit the add node button the new node will be placed at the mid point between the two selected nodes.

Just curious, why not?

The stars on the flag should always be towards the front of the vehicle, ie direction of travel.

That plate has always annoyed me. The flag on the Space Shuttle is backwards.

And just to be clear, Inkscape is a design tool. There are some plugs and tools for it to cut with, but it's not really very good for doing that.

There isn't much to one, you could aways just build your own. I plan to do that eventually, till then I'm using a plastic tote with holes cut in it.

Manual strongly suggest only drawing 2400W (20A) per outlet. It also has a noise rateing of 67dB at idle and 74dB at full load at 22 feet away. That's going to be pretty loud. If you want quit, look into the Honda generators. I've seen some of those where you could walk past it and not realize it was running.

If that doesn't do it, try flipping the decal over and peal the backing off so that the decal and app tape are laying on the table. Some app tape works better than others, what type are you useing?

Looks cool, and not trying to stir up anything, but isn't pretty much all of that stuff copyrighted?

I have been using 120, I like the slightly corser/sparkle effect.

I miss WIndows 3.11.

Maybe make it only 3 lines and have the ABC be 3D blocks stacked on top of each other.

I just do this as a hobby and am not trying to make a living at it so take this as you may. Personally I'd look at it this way, you are using about $6 in vinyl, another dollar or two for application tape, so round up and say $10 in material. How much time will you spend on this project? Figure that and give yourself a rate of say $40/hour. Double the material cost and add in your labor and there you go. If it's as easy to weed as you indicate I'd guess an hour of time, maybe two so your price would be $60-$100.

Use a design software of your choice, I use Inkscape, it's free but does have some limitations. With such a program you can node edit the vector files and tweek things or create something completely new. If you have the time an patience you can create just about anything. Inkscape does a pretty decent job at auto trace as well. You give it a standard image like the photo of the car you posted and the auto trace will try to turn it into a vector. The vector image dawn posted of your photo is the results of such an auto trace.

I can give it a shot but probably won't turn out as well as you'd like. There are a few online places that will do it for a fee or there are a couple of guys on here that can probably do it for a fee. There's also several post about techniques on how to this if you want to learn to do it. Just search for converting photo to vector.

You could always take a photo of his actual cars and convert it to a vector.